EE Harrier Tab Review Scoring Summary

Verdict:The EE Harrier Tab is a real bargain, delivering high end performance on a budget, but it’s lacking in a few areas.

EE Harrier Tab Review and Specification

The EE Harrier Tab isn’t the bargain basement device you might expect. At £199.99 it’s more expensive than an entry level tablet but it’s still half the price of a flagship slate, yet offers specs that are almost comparable.

With an octa-core processor, 4G support and a 1080p screen it certainly ticks a lot of boxes, but is it any good in practice? And is it worth the money? Read on to find out.

Design

The EE Harrier Tab isn’t likely to inspire envy from onlookers, with its plain plastic build. In fact its design is the clearest sign that this isn’t a high end tablet, with big bezels and no real design flourishes.

But while it’s plain it’s not ugly. The dark grey colour scheme coupled with a metallic effect actually leaves it looking fairly classy and at 212.8 x 124 x 8.5mm and 338g it’s fairly slim and light, which coupled with the small screen size makes it extremely portable.

It’s the sort of tablet that you can just slip in a bag and forget. It won’t take up too much space or weigh you down and given the fairly low price you won’t need to be quite as careful with it as you might be with say the iPad Air 2.

Screen

While the design of the EE Harrier Tab is a mixed bag, the screen is fairly impressive. At 8.0 inches it’s on the smaller end of tablet displays, going up against the likes of the 7.9-inch iPad mini 3, rather than the larger 10-inch tablets.

That said there are still smaller tablets around, with 7.0-inch ones proving quite popular too, so the EE Harrier Tab is neither the biggest nor smallest. Is it just right? Well, that’s subjective, but it does seem to strike a good balance.

It’s also fairly sharp at 1080 x 1920, giving it a pixel density of 275 pixels per inch. That’s not a top tier spec, but nor is it a low end one and it ensures visuals are fairly crisp.

Power

The EE Harriers Tab’s innards are even more impressive, as it has a 64-bit 1.5GHz octa-core Snapdragon processor and 2GB of RAM. That again isn’t quite top end but it’s surprisingly close for a £200 tablet and it means it’s capable of slick, smooth performance through almost any task, or indeed multiple tasks.

Its powerful performance is actually probably one of its biggest selling points, as you really don’t expect these sort of specs at this sort of price.

It’s also running the latest version of Android (5.1) and of course it supports 4G, with Cat 4 technology allowing it to get up to speeds of 60Mbps where available.

That’s fast enough to take full advantage of EE’s double speed 4G areas and it’s another big selling point for this fairly budget slate.

Camera

Surprisingly the EE Harrier Tab also has a fairly respectable camera. That’s surprising because cameras tend to be an afterthought on tablets and with good reason, since if you don’t have a better device for taking photos you may want to re-evaluate your life choices.

Still, there are times when a tablet camera could come in handy and with an 8 megapixel rear snapper the EE Harrier Tab gets the job done. There’s nothing outstanding about its camera, but it can take fairly sharp, detailed photos which will look fine on its 8-inch screen or on Facebook.

The 2 megapixel front-facing camera is a little more standard and that’s a shame as if anything we’d argue that the front-facing camera is more important on tablets, as it can function as a web cam. Still, it’s no worse than we’d expect from a tablet at this price and in fact it’s comparable to the front-facing cameras on many more expensive tablets.

Interface and features

The EE Harrier Tab has an interface which stays very close to stock Android, which can only be a good thing. It keeps things simple, with minimal pre-installed apps and a clean design, allowing you to then customise it to your liking with new apps from Google Play. It’s running Android 5.1 too so it’s up to date.

There’s not much to speak of when it comes to features. This is a basic tablet at a low price and it seems EE put most of its focus on ensuring the specs were good, rather than packing in extras, which was probably a good decision, as if the core tablet is rubbish no amount of extra features will save it.

We’ll give another shout out to its 4G support here though, as that’s something which many slates don’t offer, especially at the lower end of the market.
Battery Life, Memory and Connectivity

The EE Harrier Tab has a 4650 mAh battery, which is a fairly sizeable juice pack and should see it through a good 7-10 hours of media use, which makes it easily a match for most slates and is especially impressive given the powerful processor it’s rocking.

Its 16GB of built in storage is a little less impressive. It could be worse but for a device which you’re likely to want to store lots of apps, media and other content on it won’t go far. Thankfully there’s also support for microSD cards so it’s not quite as limiting as it might first appear.

Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G and of course 4G, making this a well-connected little slate.

Conclusion

The EE Harrier Tab is impressive, particularly when you factor in the £200 price tag, as it feels like something which could be quite a lot more expensive, thanks to a powerful octa-core processor, 2GB of RAM, a full HD screen, a decent camera, 4G support and good battery life.

The plain plastic design somewhat gives it away as a cheaper slate, but it’s still not ugly and the only other real mark against it is the small amount of built in storage, which isn’t a huge problem if you invest in a microSD card.

All in all the EE Harrier Tab is a real bargain. If you’re on a tight budget and happy to be on EE we highly recommend it.